Natalism as a Nationalist Biopolitical Response from Socialism Till Today in Hungary

Abstract

After the Second World War, the population policies of the socialist countries were not free from the dilemma of natalist/anti-natalist policies. This essay focuses on the Hungarian population policy discourses of the Kádár era and the present day, with some references to Central European specificities. The fear of the disappearance of Hungarians has been present in Hungarian intellectual discourse for several centuries, and by the twentieth century, it had become a fundamental idea that reached society as a whole. Given the growing interest (not independently of contemporary trends) in the international sociological literature not only in the transformation of biopolitics in recent decades but also in the historical antecedents of earlier periods, I believe that it may be interesting to examine the fear of national death in both a Hungarian and a Central European context.

Keywords

• socialism
• population policy
• natalism